Thursday, October 18, 2018

Giant Supercluster Discovered in the Early Universe

A
international team of astronomers has discovered a gigantic structure in
the early universe which existed about 2 billion years after the Big
Bang. Hyperion, a galaxy proto-supercluster, is the largest and most
massive structure discovered to date in the early universe.

The
team which includes scientists from the Istituto Nazionale di
Astrofisica (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and the University of California,
Davis, used the VIMOS instrument on ESO's Very large Telescope in
Paranal, Chile to identify the galaxies.

Hyperion is estimated
to have a combined mass of over 1 million billion times that of the
sun. This enormous mass is comparable to the largest structures observed
in the universe today, making this discovery very surprising for many
astronomers.

Found in the constellation of Sextans (the
Sextant), the team noticed that Hyperion has a very complex structure.
This includes seven high-density regions connected by filaments of
galaxies. These regions differ to superclusters found today as their
masses are distributed much more uniformly in a series of connected
blobs with loose associations of galaxies.

Article Compiled By: Kyle Tam

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